An American "super spy" who infiltrated the Real IRA is tobe allowed to give video link evidence at the Omagh bombcompensation case.

High Court judge Mr Justice Morgan ruled that David Rupertcan give his evidence from the United States.

Mr Rupert is currently under FBI protection.

The judge had previously been told there would be a severerisk to Mr Rupert's life if he was to give evidence inperson.

It was claimed he was living at a secret address in the USfor his own protection as his evidence would amount to a"devastating exposure" of the RIRA.

Lord Brennan, QC, leading the Omagh claimants legal team,said: "His photograph has been put on a website to try toobtain information about his whereabouts."

Mr Justice Morgan also announced that the case, brought bysome relatives of the 29 people killed and the scoresinjured in the 1998 atrocity, will start on 16 April 2007.

The case is against alleged members of the Real IRA whocarried out the bombing and five of the organisation'salleged figureheads.

The most prominent is Michael McKevitt, 56, from Blackrock,Co Louth, who is serving a 20 year sentence in Portlaoiseafter evidence given by double agent Rupert led to hisconviction as leader of the RIRA.

Dublin backbencher Barry Andrews said it would be acomplete farce if Mr Ahern's premiership comes to an endover the crisis."I back the Taoiseach 100%. He's a superb leader when youlook at how he has united the party and performed on issueslike the economy and Northern Ireland.

Earlier Carlow TD, Mr Nolan said today: "He did compromisehimself by not making an effort to repay the loans."

"I think it's not in anybody's interests that a member ofGovernment should be beholden to anybody."

Mr Nolan was one of four rebel TDs who tabled a motion ofno confidence in former Taoiseach Charles Haughey in 1991.

T naiste Michael McDowell has warned that he is notsatisfied by Mr Ahern's explanation on the Manchesterpayment and said very significant matters of concernremained.

Minister of State and Progressive Democrats president TomParlon said today: "I do believe, to whatever extent, he iscompromised. Like Michael McDowell said, I feel that he hasvery serious questions to answer."

Mr McDowell today refused to comment further on yesterday'sremarks that there were significant areas of concern aboutMr Ahern's explanations.

"I've said everything I want to say on this matteryesterday and I don't want to say anything to add orsubtract to that," he said.

Mr Ahern told reporters at the National PloughingChampionships that he would answer the questions during aspecial scheduled debate on Tuesday.

Mr Cowen said he believed Mr Ahern would be able to fullyanswer all the questions during a scheduled debated in theD il parliament next Tuesday.

"The Taoiseach has said the D il will be forum in which hewill seek to account for these matters," said Mr Cowen.

"There is no question of anything dishonest or corrupthappening here. It does not become anybody to involvethemselves in that speculation.

"Where is there any evidence to suggest that he compromisedthe performance of his public duties?"

He reiterated that the money was unsolicited and Mr Ahernwas speaking in Manchester in a personal capacity, ratherthan in his role as Minister for Finance.

In addition, there were no formal guidelines in place in1993, as there are now, in relation to the acceptance ofgifts by ministers, he insisted.

Earlier, Dermot Ahern reiterated that the Government wasstable and there was no possibility of the ProgressiveDemocrats pulling out.

"As far as I'm concerned the Coalition is very solid," hesaid.

Manchester businessman John Kennedy, who attended theManchester event, said the payment was neither a politicaldonation nor a loan.

He revealed it was organised by the late Tim Kilroe,founder of Irish regional airline Aer Arann.

The dinner took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in thecity, which was then owned by Mr Kilroe.

Mr Kennedy said around 27 people were at the function andthat a collection was made for Mr Ahern, who did not speakat the event.

"Most of the people around the table would have met him ona previous occasion but there was no particular speech," MrKennedy told RT News. "Somebody came up with the idea thatwe should make a collection to give him something and thatwas done."

A still from The Wind That Shakes the Barley, UK directorKen Loach's feature film set during the Irish Civil War inthe 1920s

Watching The Wind That Shakes the Barley, UK director KenLoach's new feature film set mainly during the Irish CivilWar in the early 1920's, it is impossible not to makecomparisons with contemporary events. Indeed Loach, whosefilm won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, has been quite explicitabout his own view that the film is not merely anexamination of the past, but a comment on the times we livein. Loach recently announced his support for the call byPalestinian film-makers, artists and others to boycottstate sponsored Israeli cultural institutions andacknowledged that "Palestinians are driven to call for thisboycott after forty years of the occupation of their land,destruction of their homes and the kidnapping and murder oftheir civilians."

The film opens in 1920 in the rolling countryside ofIreland. A group of young men are playing a boisterousfield game. As they get back to their village, they areconfronted by British soldiers. Their crime had been toplay Hurling, an ancient Irish sport similar to hockey. TheBritish had banned the sport because of its identificationwith Irish nationalism, and because the hurley, the stickused to play it, was used by resistance fighters in theirdrills in lieu of difficult to obtain rifles. When one ofthe young men, Micheail, refuses to give his name to theBritish officer in English, he is beaten to death in frontof his family and friends, galvanizing them to rally to thecause of the Irish Republican Army, fighting to rid Irelandof British rule.

This painful scene is a timeless reminder that colonialrulers-no matter how much they pretend to representcivilization and democracy-maintain their power in themanner of common street thugs: beating out people's teethand breaking their bones with rifle butts, and when thatdoesn't work, torturing and killing them and destroyingtheir homes. This mentality is alive and well in Palestine-Israel. The morning after I saw Loach's film, I wasconfronted by two statements. The first was from the UN'sspecial rapporteur for Human Rights, the distinguishedSouth African jurist John Dugard who declared that thesituation Israel had created for ordinary Palestinians inGaza was "intolerable, appalling, and tragic" and thatIsrael had turned Gaza into a giant "prison" and "thrownaway the key." The second statement came from Israel'sTrade Minister Eli Yishai who demanded that Israel shouldcompletely raze Palestinian villages in Gaza untilPalestinians learn to submit quietly to their fate. "And todo this village after village until they stop firingrockets against us."

Yet The Wind That Shakes the Barley is no feel-good storyof a heroic indigenous resistance battling against theforeign occupier. The narrative is centred on twocharacters Damien (Cillian Murphy) and Teddy (PadraicDelaney), brothers who grow up to fight side by sideagainst the British, but then find themselves on oppositesides in the brutal civil war.

Several events are key to understanding the civil war. In1916 a group of Irish nationalist and socialist leadersstaged the Easter Rising in Dublin, proclaiming anindependent "Irish Republic." At the time they hadrelatively little popular support, and the rising failed.But the brutal British response, which included executingthe leaders of the uprising, spurred growing hostility toBritish rule. In the 1918 general election to the Britishparliament, the nationalist party Sinn F‚in won a landslideon a platform of total independence from Britain. Althoughits members refused to take seats in the Britishparliament, they met in Dublin in January 1919 and ratifiedthe 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic. The IrishRepublican Army, resisting the British, were adopted as thearmed forces of this state. The British banned the self-proclaimed Irish parliament, and moved to crush Irishresistance - the same violent approach the British took tothe leaders of the 1936-39 Palestinian uprising.

Exhausted by the war, leaders of the Irish Republic signedthe Anglo-Irish Treaty with the British government in 1921.This established not an independent Ireland, but an "IrishFree State," a dominion of the British Empire, whoseofficials would have to swear an oath of allegiance to theBritish Crown. The Treaty also partioned Ireland; the FreeState's jurisdiction extended only to twenty-six counties,while six counties in the north, became Northern Ireland,created to allow the Protestant minority, mostly descendedfrom settlers and loyal to the British but with centuries-old roots in the country, to have their own state.

The Treaty bitterly split the Irish nationalist movement.Those loyal to the Irish Republic of 1919 saw it as anenormous betrayal of the independence struggle. I will notbe giving too much away by saying that the personalconsequences for the protagonists in the film arecatastrophic. In real life, families and communities weretorn apart and this dark period left a bitter legacy thatdefined the main faultline in Irish politics for most ofthe years since.

Through Palestinian eyes there is a strong echo with thesplit that has emerged on the one hand between those whoview the 1993 Oslo Accords and a two-state solution (with aPalestinian state to be created in a tiny fraction ofPalestine) as a reasonable and desirable settlement withIsrael, and those on the other who view the accords as asell-out that allowed Israel to maintain and expand itscolonial rule of Palestinians under the guise of a 'peaceprocess.' European Union officials like to make thecomparison between modern Sinn F‚in in Northern Irelandrenouncing armed struggle for purely political means withwhat they hope Hamas will do. The comparison they do notmention is between the banning of the Sinn F‚in MPs who wonthe 1918 election and Israel's wholesale kidnapping ofHamas legislators freely elected by Palestinians underoccupation in 2006.

Early in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, we see Irishresistance fighters being tortured by British officers in aprison. We see the same prison again later, but now FreeState officers are using it to hold and interrogate theirRepublican former comrades. Yet another scene sounfortunately reminiscent of what happened after Oslo. Akey difference to celebrate is that across Palestiniansociety there remains a determination to avoid internalconflict even though Israel and the United States haveoften demanded that the Oslo-created security forces crushcontinued resistance to Israel just as the Free State armycrushed and executed Irish Republicans with British-supplied weapons. Palestinians must strive to ensure thatthey are never pulled into such a trap.

Talk to almost anyone in Ireland today and they will tellyou it is not so simple, so black and white as the filmmakes it appear. In 1949, the contested Free State becamethe Republic of Ireland, recognized by all but a smallminority of Republicans. Today Ireland is a prosperousindependent country and a member of the European Union,whose national mythology elides the Anglo-Irish Treaty andCivil War and celebrates the "martyrs" of the 1916 EasterRising and the long struggle against British rule.

In the end it was possible to get the British out of mostof Ireland, allowing independence, but that was not enoughto bring peace. In the British-ruled six counties of thenorth, continued oppression of the Catholic population ledto The Troubles, the thirty year war that broke out in1968. Although violence has ended, a political settlementacceptable to all the people who live there seems onlyslightly closer than it was the day after partition. Thebasic structure of the conflict in Palestine-Israel todayis like Northern Ireland writ large-two communities ofroughly equal size with nowhere else to go brought intobloody confrontation by colonialism. There can be nosolution that preserves the domination of one over theother and none that is good for everyone that comes out ofviolence. A just solution based on full equality is stillbe worked for and hoped for in Northern Ireland and inPalestine-Israel. But as The Wind That Shakes the Barley somovingly depicts, history does not always provide easy orhappy endings that fit neatly with passionately heldideals.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada andauthor of One Country, A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006)